The idea that you could double your profits in less than a year seems a little far-fetched if you’re a down-to-Earth entrepreneur. But such things can and do happen. And such opportunities are open to most brands. It’s just a matter of tapping into and exploiting them to their full potential.
In this post, we take a look at some actionable strategies you can use to transform your company over the next twelve months. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Start Dreaming Big
The biggest impediment to business success isn’t always reality – it’s how you perceive your place in the world. If you see your business as always playing second fiddle to the market leader, you’ll remain in second place forever and won’t progress.
Dreaming big, therefore, changes your mindset. It’s not about tricking yourself or being unrealistic. Instead, it’s just a process of reminding yourself that you can actually do whatever anybody else is doing better.
Once you allow yourself to explore possibilities, the day-to-day way you approach your business alters. You suddenly feel freed up to pursue grander projects and you take a longer-term perspective. Your customers feel it too. And that can encourage them to spend more and send referrals your way.
Write Down Your Stretch Goals
Writing down your stretch goals is critical because it sets a high mark. No – you might not achieve them in the timescale you set initially. But that doesn’t matter. The point of stretch goals is to push you further than you would have gone without them.
Entrepreneurs do this all the time. Elon Musk, for instance, is famous for setting ridiculous objectives, like landing a man on Mars in 2024 or having a fully autonomous car on the road by 2020. But it’s ambitious goal-setting like that which makes things happen in business. Everyone just works harder and sees the goal as a challenge. They want to reach it to prove themselves. And that is what drives the whole process forwards at such an incredible pace.
Raise Your Prices
Raising your prices sounds like a crazy thing to do in a competitive market. But many entrepreneurs vastly underestimate their value to others. You’ll usually find that your customers will endure higher prices if they believe that you are the only person who can provide them with a reasonable service. It doesn’t matter if you are 20 percent costlier than your nearest competitor – if they don’t provide what customers want, customers will still come to you.
Raising your prices is one of the easiest ways to double your profits. You don’t have to put in any extra work (other than what you already do), and that frees you up tremendously to pursue other profit-related goals.
Improve Your Marketing
Many brands fail to live up to their potential because they don’t reach out to customers online successfully. They have a piecemeal approach and don’t think about how it all comes together.
Using an integrated marketing company can help solve this problem and expose the brand to more relevant prospects. By drawing all the threads together, any strategy has a bigger impact, driving more traffic to your website, and boosting conversions.
How can you improve your marketing? Simple. Try the following ideas:
- Create more native content and publish it on third-party sites your audience uses
- Create sales funnels on your website that guide users towards a purchase
- Ensure you are targeting the correct type of user in your ads
- Make your content more engaging, informative and funny
- Build an email list and then provide real value to users’ inboxes (such as the opportunity to enter a competitor or get money off a future purchase).
Find Out Why Customers Are Leaving You
In some cases, you’ll want to go digging to find out why your customers are leaving you. Many companies don’t spend any time doing this at all, even though it could lead to massive gains in revenue and profits. Mostly, they focus exclusively on how to attract new customers.
When you think about it, this approach doesn’t make much sense. It’s like expecting the bathtub to fill up without first plugging the drain. You’re fighting a losing battle. So at least some of your marketing budget should go towards finding out what’s going wrong. Many companies discover that they can actually make more money using this method than they can via fresh outreach.
Compete More Intelligently
It can be challenging to set prices in competitive markets. You always worry that your customers will refuse to pay your high fees and go elsewhere.
The trick here is to compete more intelligently. Instead of trying to provide the same service as your rivals, think about how you might go about it differently. Then use that as a justification for your higher prices. Only charge customers more if it improves your margins. Otherwise, changing your approach won’t improve your profits, and it could harm them.
Make It Easier For Customers To Schedule Appointments
You could also try improving profits by making it easier for customers to schedule appointments – a strategy that’s particularly helpful during pandemics. Try setting up an appointment calendar on your website. Let customers simply click available time slots and schedule their visits.
If you’re having trouble filling your appointment schedule, try automating some elements of your marketing. For instance, you could use email and social network marketing apps to drive leads without having to spend any time doing it yourself.
Boost Your SEO
Here’s another idea: boost your SEO.
SEO refers to a set of practices designed to increase your ranking in search engine results for specific keywords. The higher you rank, the more likely customers are to click on your site and consume your content.
Boosting your SEO, therefore, can have a tremendous impact on your sales. If you can tap into that latent market, you often find your sales figures shooting up tremendously.
There are all kinds of ways to double the traffic to your site via SEO. This includes:
- Improving the quality of your blogs
- Including target keywords in your headings and subheading
- Building links to third-party sites
- Improving the speed at which your website loads
- Switching from HTTP to HTTPS
- Getting rid of annoying pop-ups that users don’t like
- Writing quality posts that encourage organic backlinking
- Using rich media, such as video, to encourage visitors to stay on your site for longer
When doubling traffic to your website, be sure to remain clear in your mind who you are targeting. Once you know your target customer, you can much more effectively direct your marketing budget.
Search For New Customers
It might sound a little obvious, but the final thing you can do to increase your profits is find new customers. If you’ve saturated one market, it might be time to move onto another.
For instance, suppose you have been marketing via social media for the last year. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you could be missing a trick. For instance, if your audience is mainly senior managers and business professionals, you might have better luck posting ads on podcast segments. That’s because this particular demographic consumes podcasts disproportionately.
Growing your profits by 100 percent in twelve months seems impossible if you think there’s only one way of doing it. But when you combine the ideas outlined above, you soon find that things go in the right direction fast.
Doubling your profits isn’t guaranteed. But plenty of companies achieve it. It just requires looking at the market in a different way and changing tack.